We were praised in high school for getting straight As. It was all about dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s, and following instructions to nth degree.You’d get penalties for spelling mistakes and not formatting your paper right. For not handing in a paper on time or being late to class. The school system is designed to streamline you to be as “perfect” as you can.

School Ruined Blogging

So it’s no wonder many of us are afraid of blogging. It’s not that we don’t know what to write, or that it will take us too long, we’re worried that it won’t be good enough. That it won’t be perfect. That someone will call us up and say, “

I can’t believe you wrote that. What were you thinking

?”That fear is enough to put the “do a blog post” on the back burn, eternally.And who’s to blame?

Well, that depends on the small business. We focus a lot on business owners or people who have several employees, so that’s who we’re going to chat about.

most effective advertising for small businesses

Honestly, it’s nothing new. The most effective advertising for small businesses is simply doing a fantastic job.

Really?

Yes.

What do you do? What do you do really well? What do you do really well that makes people come home after buying your product or receiving your service that makes them tell their friend/spouse/insert someone important here?

Hubspot just released what they think will happen in marketing trends in 2013 and beyond. It’s a great set of predictions from some pretty smart people, but they’re geared towards larger companies.

How many small businesses do you know that have a CMO, a CIO and so on… I want to highlight my top 6 predictions and how they’re relevant to small and powerful businesses.

Prediction 7: Social & Content Impact SEO Even More

This is a good one to start off with because it’s about a topic most of us loath, mainly because we don’t understand it – SEO.

“Over the years, good search SEO was all about knowing the tricks of the trade. The SEO of tomorrow will be less about having the right H1 tag or the right keywords on the page and more about creating really good, original content that is socially consumed and shared.”

I was having a conversation with a young female entrepreneur who curates and sells Scandinavian jewellery from the 1960s. We were talking about the value of using keywords for blogging and focusing your online marketing campaign. She asked me, “will keywords hurt my business?”While Cosima sees the value in using keywords to help customers find hopea online, but she was concerned that her brand would be hurt by the strict focus on writing about keywords. Her brand is built around design and aesthetics, and how can she show her value when she’s forced to use certain words in her blog?

You may have heard this word a few times now, and you’re probably wondering, what is “inbound marketing” really like? I’ve heard people describe it several ways, including “It’s like doing a bunch of stuff online” or “It’s how you get customers using the Internet.” While they’re true, that’s like me saying “Planes take you to 30,000 feet” or “Running outside helps you bump into your neighbours.”

So what? They don’t give you the full picture, and can be difficult to relate to. That’s why we’ve broken it down and compared it to something more familiar: learning to play the piano.

Inbound Marketing Explained: It’s Like Learning The Piano

Local internet marketing is important for many businesses – restaurants, hairdressers, yoga studios, realtors, accountants – you name it! If your business is focused on getting customers in your city, local internet marketing will be an important part of your online campaign.

Local marketing helps you increase your ranking for results where your business is located. As you can see on the right, local results in search engines look different than regular results.

How To Use Local Internet Marketing

It’s a natural step to go from a generalized online marketing approach to one focused on local internet marketing – take what you’re already doing and adjust it. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of online marketing, check out our 12 Step Guide To Getting Customers Online. [Read more…]

If you haven’t started thinking about analytics yet, check out our intro to online analytics for small businesses. Once you understand what analytics are and why you need them, we can get started on how to use them for your business.

More Isn’t Merrier

The beauty of online marketing is that you can measure almost anything. However, just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean you should. Interpreting the results from your analytics is time consuming, and time is your most important resource!

There are lots of tools available to measure analytics for small businesses – for your website or blog we recommend using Google Analytics, which is free. To help you get started, we’ve put together a quick overview of 2 analytics to measure for each part of your inbound marketing campaign. This isn’t a complete list, however it’s a great overview to get you started. [Read more…]

Small business is growing in Canada. As a company that helps small businesses grow and realize their dreams, there’s nothing more exciting for us than seeing growth in the small business sector across the country. That’s why this article on the growing Canadian entrepreneur community from Biv.com makes everyone at Spokal look forward to what’s coming our way.

The article cites a recent report from CIBC that claims a huge boom is coming for small businesses in Canada. Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC, says that over the next decade we may see the strongest activity in the startup community in Canadian history! [Read more…]

Before we get into the 5 places you MUST use keywords, make sure you’re familiar with how to blog for your business. When you feel comfortable with the concept of keywords, we’ll get started on how to use them in your blog.

Does It Matter Where The Keywords Go?

Yes. Think of it like a lab report. Did you ever do one of those in high school or university? It doesn’t matter how great your content or results are – if you don’t format it in the right way, you lose marks.

So where do your keywords go?

Good question. After you’ve picked your keywords using an application like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, it’s time to write your blog.There are 5 places you absolutely MUST use keywords to make sure that you have the best chance to rank for that word. If you don’t place keywords properly, Google will have a hard time figuring out what you do, which means your keyword research will be, well, a bit of a waste.

Just like with inbound marketing, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can be a complicated topic that leaves you with more questions than answers. What is SEO? How does it work? What am I trying to accomplish? Seriously, what does it mean?So we’ve broken it down and compared it something that you’ve probably been through…highschool. Yup, that’s right, SEO is like being in High School.

5 Ways SEO Is Like Being High School

You may be a bit older now and your days of hanging out under the bleachers are behind you, but there are still a few lessons that you can learned from your teenage years.

1) You start with all the classes, then pick what works for you.

When you start trying to rank on search engines using SEO, chances are you’ll be blogging about several topics, using several social media tools and email campaigns. But SEO is not a one size fits all solution – as you get a feel for what works for your business, you can narrow down what you’re doing and be more precise with your time and efforts.